Directions:Read the following four passages. Answer the
questions below by choosing A, B, C or D. Thanks to
closed doors and fierce gatekeepers, bosses are tricky to observe in their
natural habitat. Yet it might be useful to know what they do all day, and
whether any of it benefits shareholders. A new Harvard Business School working
paper sheds some light. Researchers asked the chief executives
of 94 Italian firms to have their assistants record their activities for a week.
You may take this with a grain of salt. Is the boss’s assistant a neutral
observer If the boss spends his lunch hour drinking a lot, or in a motel with
his assistant, will she record this truthfully Nonetheless, here are the
results. The average Italian boss works for 48 hours a week and
spends 60% of that time in meetings. The most diligent put in another 20 hours.
And the longer they work, the better the company does. Less
diligent chief executives are more likely to have one-to-one meetings with
people from outside the company. The authors speculate that such people are
trying to raise their own profile, perhaps to secure a better job. Bosses who
work longer hours, by contrast, spend more of them meeting their own
employees. Bosses often complain that they get bogged down in
day-to-day operations, says Rajesh Chandy, a professor at the London Business
School. Regulations that make them legally responsible for their underlings’
wrongdoings are partly to blame. The prospect of jail is a powerful
attention-grabber. Many bosses also feel they must dash around the world
pitching to clients. Mr Chandy thinks bosses should spend less time with clients
and more time thinking about the future. How much time they
spend thinking about anything is hard to measure. But in an experiment, Mr
Chandy measured how often bosses use forward-looking words like "will" and
"shall" in their public statements. He concluded that bosses spend only 3%~4% of
their day thinking about long-term strategy. Brian Sullivan,
the chief executive of CTPartners, a headhunting firm, says the most difficult
part of his job is saying no to people who want a piece of his time. Mr Sullivan
says the only time he gets for blue-sky thinking is when he is in the
sky. Bill Gates took regular "think weeks", when he would sit
alone in a cabin for 18 hours a day reading and contemplating. This, it is said,
led to such strategic masterstrokes as "the Internet tidal wave memo" in 1995,
which shifted Microsofrs focus to the web. But not every boss thinks he needs
more time for thinking. "You can hire McKinsey to do that for you," says
one. The author estimates that people’s attitude towards the working paper
of Harvard Business School might be ______.
A. critical
B. suspicious
C. interested
D. neutral